Idiot's Delight (Clarence Brown, 1939)

Clark Gable and Norma Shearer in Idiot's Delight

Cast: Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, Edward Arnold, Charles Coburn, Joseph Schildkraut, Burgess Meredith, Laura Hope Crews, Richard "Skeets" Gallagher, Peter Willes, Pat Paterson, William Edmunds, Fritz Feld. Screenplay: Robert E. Sherwood, based on his play. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Robert Kern. Music: Herbert Stothart.

To make a critic's obvious joke, Idiot's Delight is sometimes idiotic and rarely delightful. It's mostly a rather ill-advised filming of Robert E. Sherwood's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1936 play about a world on the brink of war. The world was even further out on that brink by the time the film was made, and two distinct endings were shot. One, for U.S. audiences, is conventionally neutral (as the United States was at the time) about whether a world war was about to happen. The other, to be shown abroad, takes a more pessimistic view. But the whole film is riddled with a confusion of tone. This is the movie in which Clark Gable, playing a vaudevillian, sings and dances to Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz" and is carried offstage by a group of chorus girls -- a sequence revived by its inclusion in the 1974 celebration of MGM musical numbers, That's Entertainment. Gable is game throughout the film, especially when he has to play opposite Norma Shearer at her most arch. The original Broadway version starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne; Gable and Shearer are not the Lunts.

The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, 1927)

Director Cecil B. DeMille always had a fondness for unintentionally hilarious dialogue. Think of Anne Baxter's Nefretiri purring to Charlton Heston's Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956), "Oh, Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid adorable fool!" I'm almost sorry that The King of Kings is a silent film, so that we can't hear Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan) utter the line: "Harness my zebras -- gift of the Nubian king! This Carpenter shall learn that he cannot hold a man from Mary Magdalene!" After the intertitle card fades, she swans off to rescue her lover, Judas Iscariot (Joseph Schildkraut), from the clutches of Jesus (H.B. Warner). It seems that Judas has become a disciple of Jesus because he believes that he has a chance at a powerful position in the new kingdom that Jesus is planning. This isn't the only hashing-up of the gospels that the credited scenarist, Jeanie Macpherson, commits, but it's the most surprising one. It also gives director DeMille an opportunity to introduce some sexy sinning before he gets pious on us: The Magdalene is vamping around a somewhat stylized orgy and wearing a costume (probably designed by an uncredited Adrian, who was good at that sort of thing) that leaves one breast almost bare. This opening sequence is also in two-strip Technicolor, as is the Resurrection scene some two and a half hours later. Yes, it's an enormously tasteless movie. Warner's Jesus is the usual blue-eyed blond in a white bathrobe found in vulgar iconography, and the actor has little to do but stand around looking wistful and sad at the plight of the world, occasionally giving a little smile that, with Warner's thin, lipsticked mouth, verges dangerously on a smirk. The film goes heavy on the miracles, even recasting one of the gospel writers, Mark, as a boy (Michael D. Moore) cured of lameness by Jesus. (When he throws away his crutch, it accidentally strikes one of the Pharisees standing nearby, only adding to their enmity to Jesus.) Unfortunately, DeMille stages the revival of Lazarus in a way that enhances its creepiness, having him emerge from a sarcophagus swathed in bandages like a horror-film mummy. Still, there's entertainment to be had, if you're not too demanding. Schildkraut's Judas is fun to watch at times: Once, he even skulks away like Dracula with his face hidden by his cloak. His father, Rudolph Schildkraut, plays the sneering high priest Caiaphas, Victor Varconi is a suitably conflicted Pontius Pilate, and William Boyd, soon to make his name as Hopalong Cassidy, is Simon of Cyrene, who helps Jesus carry the cross. The storm and earthquake after the Crucifixion is a DeMille-style special-effects extravaganza. The cinematography by J. Peverell Marley leans heavily on filters and screens to cast halos around Jesus, but does what it can to bring DeMille's characteristic tableau groupings to life. Fortunately, the movie also goes out of its way to avoid arousing antisemitism: The crowds calling for crucifixion are shown to be largely made up of bribed bullies who are suppressing those who want Jesus released, and one man furiously rejects the bribe by saying that as a Jew he cannot betray a brother.

Orphans of the Storm (D.W. Griffith, 1921)

Who knew that one of the chief causes of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror was "Bolshevism"?  Or that Danton, who helped send Louis XVI to the guillotine, was "the Abraham Lincoln of France," as one of the title cards for Orphans of the Storm proclaims? D.W. Griffith's gift for pseudo-historical hokum stood him in good stead in making this often preposterous classic, but it worked even better for Lillian and Dorothy Gish, whose performances as the titular orphans are superb. I think Dorothy may give the better performance as Louise, the foundling who is left blind by the "plague" that killed her adoptive parents, but that may be because I've seen Lillian's winsome tricks more often than Dorothy's. Lillian certainly flings herself into the role of Henriette, who became Louise's sister after her parents took in the girl as an infant, and her caretaker after she became blind. The girls go to Paris in search of a cure for Louise's blindness, and there Henriette is abducted by a lecherous aristocrat but saved by the virtuous Chevalier de Vaudrey (a surprisingly handsome young Joseph Schildkraut). Separated from Henriette, Louise falls into the clutches of the conniving Mother Frochard (Lucille La Verne), who puts the blind girl to work begging on the streets. (La Verne sports a monstrous wen and a mustache, reminding us that she was the voice of the wicked queen and the witch in the 1937 Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.) And then comes the Revolution, in which Henriette almost loses her head to the guillotine, thanks to the evil Robespierre (Sidney Herbert), before being rescued by, of all people, Danton (Monte Blue). (An end title informs us that the Reign of Terror ceased when Robespierre was beheaded, but conveniently ignores the similar fate of Danton.) In the end, Henriette and de Vaudrey are to be married, and Louise not only regains her sight but also learns that she was the daughter of the Countess de Linieres (Katherine Emmet) from a previous marriage to a commoner that was suppressed by the countess's family. This delicious stuff, which Griffith's screenplay took from a play by Adolphe d'Ennery and Eugène Cormon along with liberal borrowings from Dumas, Dickens, and Victor Hugo, is kept furiously a-boil by Griffith's superb gift for pacing and cutting. He never lets the action flag, even for the necessary exposition.